Resto Quest - a serious game on the restorative effects of immersive virtual environments

Mostly, restorative environments, like parks and forests, are only thought of in the real world. However, one can wonder whether their restorative effects translate to a virtual world; and whether the environment itself makes any difference. In order to assess the possible translation of restorative properties from the real world to a virtual setting, we developed Resto Quest, a single-player, first-person exploration game, designed to investigate the possible restorative effects of both natural and urban virtual environments. Resto Quest is playable on a normal personal computer, and its main game play loop consists of exploring the environment, locating in it a task to accomplish, and completing a simple minigame. After completion of each minigame, a positive change in the scenery takes place. Evaluation of Resto Quest has shown that players found its game mechanics relaxing, and that the minigames offer balanced difficulty between two interchangeable environments.

@InProceedings { CMLPSWBHB22,
  author       = "Chen, Weilun and Martin Hoogerwaard, Conchita and Lim, Jeffrey and Polderdijk, Tim and Saveur, Tom and Wali,
                  Asror and Brinkman, Suzanne and Ham, Ineke J.M. van der and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Resto Quest - a serious game on the restorative effects of immersive virtual environments",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of ISAGA 2022 - 53rd conference of the International Simulation and Gaming Association",
  volume       = "LNCS XXX",
  year         = "2022",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2022/CMLPSWBHB22"
}